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Tag: status

I remember what it was like to be anonymous, and I miss it in the way that lovers miss each other.

Anonymity in Tokyo was a bipolar experience. On the one side there was very little chance of anyone knowing who I was, yet on the other my gleaming white skin attracted nearly every pair of eyes wherever I went, outside of the foreign enclaves. In the ten years of taking the trains and running up and down hundreds of side-streets, stairwells, and escalators not once did I hear someone call my name, tap me on the shoulder with a “hey, Jack”, or later remark that they’d seen me going somewhere in a hurry and hadn’t bothered to stop me on my way.

I was also bereft of my own ego, crippled in positive ways. I learned the numbing pain of non-competition, for how could I ever even dream of competing there? The things I worked for I got, certainly, but so much more was walled off, out of sight and out of reach to all but the native inhabitants. My skin was wrong, my voice was wrong, my culture and behaviour all wrong, and I was fine with that. You had to be, to survive. To keep your faculties intact you had to adopt the position you were forced into from all sides: that of the foreigner. The gaijin, or gaikokujin if you’re fancy.

I’d spent the prior 23 years of my life pushing myself to the outskirts of the society I’d been born into and yet there in Tokyo I’d found myself forcibly placed there by the simple virtue of being born an outsider. I revelled in it, I played the part to the hilt, and now all I have is the memory, like the fading and blurry after-image of a crowd that’s been obliterated by a flashbulb.

“Thanks for the warning.” Jake threw the makeshift launcher over his shoulders and spat his cigar-stub into a puddle where it hissed and didn’t quite extinguish.

“Do you have something against study?”

“No. Where would we be,” Jake said, then grunted as he kicked at the door. Again he kicked, sending showers of splinters to the polished floor of the hallway. He sniffed and reared back, throwing himself forward with a final, timber-shattering lunge. “Huh,” he grunted, and stepped over the door’s remains.

“Where would we be?” the scholar called after Jake, taking care not to enter the new room. He had been very cautious since Alphonse had scouted the second chamber and been sliced into neat cubes of meat by hidden tracking lasers.

“-without all these centuries of knowledge collected by folks like yourself?” Jake said, poking his head back into the hallway and grinning at the scholar. “It looks safe enough. Stay close.”